Swiss Made, Chokepoints and a Digital Pandemic ft. ITU's Tomas Lamanauskas

What actually happens when the internet stops working? Not the brief flicker-of-wifi kind, but a real digital pandemic - solar storms, satellite collisions, and heat waves taking out the servers holding your bank account, your health records and your group chats hostage.

That's the world ITU Deputy Secretary-General Tomas Lamanauskas has been mapping in the International Telecommunication Union's new Digital Risk Report, and it turns out digital resilience is now squarely a trade and infrastructure story, not just an IT problem. Ardian and Rob talk to Lamanauskas about why the ITU is borrowing pandemic language to describe outages, the mechanics of Kessler Syndrome (yes, the Gravity/Armageddon scenario), why submarine cables need their own 42-expert international advisory board, and why "analog skills" - like knowing how to function without WhatsApp for an afternoon - are suddenly a policy conversation.

Before the interview, Ardian and Rob run through this month's "What Went Wrong": why the FT thinks Swiss manufacturing faces a harder question than tariffs alone - namely, what "Swiss made" actually means once companies like Bernina start moving production to Thailand while keeping the engineering at home. They also cover Switzerland's newly upgraded free trade agreement with China, which pushes Swiss duty-free access to the Chinese market from roughly 50% to 99.8%, and the US-Canada trade collapse that the Wall Street Journal has dubbed "the stupidest trade war ever" - 50% tariffs on Canadian goods and cars, retaliatory tariffs starting September 8th, and China's opportunistic pitch to Ottawa as the more predictable trading partner.

Plus: listener feedback on sustainable aviation fuel and greenwashing, Silicon Valley's new favorite recession indicator (limited-edition AI-branded Tudor watches), and a bridge in France that gives oversized vehicles a very unwanted haircut.

Listen to episode 92 of Trade Splaining wherever you get your podcasts, and let us know what you think at tradesplaining@gmail.com.